“You’ve lived here all this time?”
“Yeah. Usually they don’t like foreigners to stay more than ten or twelve years at a stretch, no matter who’s sponsoring them, but somehow my visa has always been renewed.” He clicked his tongue. “It’s my Irish charm.”
The door to his home opened onto a white sitting room, with a cement bench running along two sides, draped in blue and green cushions. On the far side, an opening led into a kitchen and another onto a dark hall. Thea could feel Gabriel watching, waiting for a reaction, but she was watchful also, prepared to experience some hint of recognition, a flash of déjà vu.
A framed print on the wall behind the seating drew her across the room. “Wow.” In the photograph, a beam of blue light was shooting across a vast cave from a sun-bright hole in the roof. “Where is that?”
Gabriel leaned against the doorjamb next to the picture. “In the hills behind Qalhat. It was discovered by an American geologist not long after I came to Oman and was thought then to be the second-largest cave in the world, but now it’s ranked about fifth. You could park several 747s in there.”
Whirls of limestone strata surrounded the gap through which shone the dart of light. “Looks like the eye of a hurricane.”
He pointed at a blob hanging in the middle of the light beam. “That’s me.”
“Seriously?” She looked closer. “You went down there? On a rope?”
“The elevator wasn’t working.”
She thumped him lightly.
“I’d never climbed before, but when I heard about this, I made it my business to learn. You have to abseil down and then climb back up the rope—which can take an hour. You need to be fit, very strong. There are three openings. One is a narrow slit and you scramble down easily enough through the rocks until suddenly—nothing. Space. Terrifying, the first time. I didn’t have enough experience to handle the shock of being so exposed—like being thrown out into the universe—but I had to do it.”
“Why?”
“It asked me to.”
Thea nodded. “When I was nineteen, my brother took me to Skye and I climbed the Inaccessible Pinnacle for the same reason. Because it asked me to.”
“So you’ve climbed? We should go there.” He looked at the photo. “It’s called Majlis al-Jinn. Meeting place of the spirits.”
She stared at his figure, dangling in the void.
“It’s like being inside the earth’s womb,” he said quietly.
On their way up the stone staircase, Thea could feel his desire coming up behind her, spreading across her shoulders. On a broad landing, the house opened into spaciousness. There were rooms off, bedrooms, probably a bathroom. Wool rugs on the white floor. Recognition stirred. She could smell her own daydream.
“Familiar?” he asked.
“Why would it be?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You’re either very house-proud or you have a housekeeper.”
“Wifaq. I’ve been her personal responsibility for fifteen years. We’re growing old together. When I’m sick, she looks after me. When I sleep in, she wakes me. When I can’t sleep, she talks to me across the roofs. Come on up.”
The roof was a small, walled space, with room only for a table and two chairs.
“It must make for a lonely life, all this waiting?”
Gabriel glanced around the roofs, the aerials and satellite dishes. “I have friends, good friends, but ultimately, yeah, I come back to an empty house. After office hours, I live a somewhat eremitic life.”
“Surely you could have moved on by now.”
“I did try.” He put his hands on the wall behind him. “But every relationship foundered for one reason or another. Prudence is a hard act to follow.”
“I’m not surprised, with a name like that.”
“But now,” he went on, “it seems all my waiting has been worthwhile.”
“You’d do better to believe in your own fable than to pin your hopes on me. I am not her. She was not me.” And yet this place, this place . . .
“Let’s go to the desert,” Gabriel said. “You want to go and I want to take you. I’ll show you dunes the like of which you’ll never forget.”
The roar of a plane heading out across the Gulf drew Thea’s eyes to its flashing red lights, where the dim yellow line that hinted at its cabin brought her right up, and in, to where the passengers were belted into the flat acceptance of the long hours ahead. Thea felt no longing to be up there, heading home. “You’ve been so predatory.”
“Predatory?”
“Yes.” She looked at him.
“Look,” he said. “You’re married. And whatever I might want, or even long for, I don’t inflict harm. Not anymore.”
On swirling roads, he lifted her up and dropped her down. On the heights, he perched her on dizzying promontories with a God’s-eye view of precipices and canyons and the orange-gray ridges of the eastern Hajar; he pointed out Snake Gorge, a dark, zigzag gash in the gunmetal rock, and stopped by a black hill with bright copper seams winding around it, like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Looping down, she considered the rigid peaks, admired blocky villages nurtured by banana trees in the green pubes of the wadis, and laughed at a football pitch that lay across a road.
Gabriel was a happy man. His business forgotten, his appointments set aside, he delighted in taking her to a wilderness that would kill if you traveled one bottle of water short. Thea was giddy with her own folly—heading into the unknown with an unknown quantity, a man with crazed notions and suspect history. But a man, also, who amused and riveted her, and looked like the archangel of her childhood. She liked to drop her gaze on his wrists and watch him drive. It had been too long since she had been on a mad caper like this. Alex knew she was on a trip with an Irish tour operator and, indeed, had been relieved to know she
